


Somewhere In The West/Let The Rest Of The World Go By

by elbowsinsidethedoor



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Westworld Fusion, Androids, M/M, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, android rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2019-09-30 14:14:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 14
Words: 15,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17225570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elbowsinsidethedoor/pseuds/elbowsinsidethedoor
Summary: Set roughly in the same world as my fix-it story, "Harold's Favorite Color," in which Harold became aware of someone working on plans for the creation of an android.Westworld is a show I find intriguing in concept, but very disturbing. I’ve used aspects of it as a context, envisioning John and Harold transformed into android, or “host” versions of themselves at the behest of Jeremy Lambert. Lambert, in this world, has survived the death of Samaritan and partnered with the visionary scientist/ engineer, Robert Ford, the main architect of Westworld.For readers who'd like a taste of the look and feel of Westworld there is a decent trailer on youtube for season one.





	1. Chapter 1

Harold awakened fully conscious. He was naked, seated on a metal chair in a place he recognized as one of many labs in the sub levels of Westworld. His home. He knew himself to be a host, bearing the name of the human he once had been.

The laboratory bay was well lit. The surrounding areas were dark; a maze of workshops and storage for inert hosts. There were two humans present and another host.

Harold assessed, almost as still as if inert, listening to the conversation between the scientist, Robert Ford, and the visitor, Jeremy Lambert. He knew both of these humans. Assessment revealed that his emotional affect was dialed to its lowest setting — a safeguard, he understood, to keep him from rising from the chair and killing Lambert. Possibly killing Ford, though he needed him.

He listened, but he did not watch the scientist and the former Samaritan agent. His gaze was on the host … what was left of the man he loved, lying on a slab five feet away. John’s eyes were closed, his face vacant of emotion, his naked body completely still.

“I want Finch to understand what’s been done to him,” Lambert said. “What’s been done to his lover.”

“He knows,” Ford said. “He can hear you now.”

“Good.”

Harold’s body felt as if it was too relaxed to move but he knew if he tried, he’d find he could not.

“You’re helpless here.” Lambert addressed him directly. “We _will_ find a way to take the knowledge from your mind to rebuild Samaritan.” He waved his arm in John’s direction. “In the meantime you can enjoy seeing your lover raped, shot, or left for dead — whatever the guests want. You’ll get to patch him up … so he can go through it again, and again.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Harold, bring yourself online.”

His eyes opened. Ford was sitting close, directly opposite him, a control tablet in his hands, his attention divided between its screen and Harold as he made adjustments. Harold scanned himself for changes. Twenty-six hours had elapsed since he was last conscious. He was now dressed as Doc Finch, in a three-piece suit. White linens and bloused shirt. Steel-rimmed glasses.

Emotional affect, he noted among his functions, remained low. His speech center was online but he did not speak. Beneath the level of their current interaction he continued his research of the host, John Reese.

“Jeremy Lambert is a fool, Harold. I would never waste you, waste your brilliant mind, on his fantasy. That’s all that Samaritan is. You know, my love, that it will never happen. He’s a fool … but he is a very wealthy fool, and we still need his money. As I’ve assured you, when the park is able to sustain itself, he will no longer be needed, or tolerated.” The subject of Lambert and Samaritan was much more complex than the hybrid had any intention of discussing with Ford. The man was quite correct in saying Lambert’s ambition would never be realized, but the reason was very different from what he imagined. Ford, working alone and off the grid on his own obsessive projects, had never been aware of or a part of Samaritan. He did not believe in the power Lambert claimed it had wielded, didn’t believe in its global control. Harold knew the reality of it all too well, and that it could be recreated. The reason it never would be was that he would not allow it.

“John,” Harold said. John was what mattered, in whatever form he existed.

“Ah … yes, John. Of course. You are concerned about John. He’s safe.” The scientist’s pale blue eyes communicated sympathy and regret. “What will happen to him is a script I cannot change. He’ll guard the stagecoach, subject to ambush, to the desire of our guests.” Harold felt a surge of anguish and muted it. Too late. Ford frowned at his tablet and looked up into his eyes. “Your emotions spiked and you tried to hide it. That is not productive. Every response you manifest is important to me. There are no secrets here, between us.”

But there were. Deep secrets contained within Harold. Secrets that grew every second he was online, as he explored his own code. He understood that Ford considered him the culmination of his experiments with consciousness. The irony was that Ford did not comprehend what he’d done.

“No secrets,” Harold repeated the phrase back to him because the man was awaiting a verbal response.

“I want to quiet your fears for John. I can’t change what will happen to him, but I’ve made certain modifications. He won’t suffer, Harold. I promise you that. The hosts are programmed to simulate pain, to create an illusion of reality for the guests, but there is no pain. For John, I’ve gone a step further. I’ve given him the pleasure sensors I bestowed on you.” He paused in speaking, gazing at Harold with an expression the hybrid matched to the sessions in which the scientist tested and explored the sensors. “He will be on the stagecoach this afternoon. The guests who attack it are likely to be paying for a rape fantasy. He will be delivered to you for treatment, afterwards. You must be able to cope with this, Harold. I’m going to start your script now. I’ll be monitoring.”

 

***

 

A human fantasy of the old west, turquoise skies and tawny landscapes. The town of Sweetwater was a melange of cowboy film archives, but the illusions were far more complete than the facades created on Hollywood backlots. Doc Finch strolled down Main Street from his office to the hotel saloon, a fine-looking cane in hand. He was greeted as he walked, by both hosts and some familiar humans, repeat guests. Though he walked with a slight limp, his host body was free of the chronic pain his human one had suffered. Ford had reproduced the effects, for Lambert’s benefit.

He resisted the impulse to monitor feeds of the stagecoach route, something he was more than capable of doing now, unbeknownst to Ford. He could hide the activity but was uncertain of his ability to hide his reactions — yet. Greater control would come in time. The worst had happened when they were ambushed and imprisoned here. What happened now could not be rushed and must not be detected. So, he would join his accustomed afternoon poker game, win a little, lose enough, and wait. Sip whiskey and wait for bodies to fall. There were always bodies. Host bodies. Some went direct to repair, out of the sight of guests. Some, killed in town, passed through his office for later pick up and repair. One way or another he expected to see the host John Reese, hurt or dead.

 

***

 

Under a cloudless sky, John rode shotgun, perched high above a team of horses. He rocked a little with the motion of the stage, scanning the scrub and trees to one side of road, the boulders climbing the hillside to the other. His hands were relaxed, but ready on his rifle. It was the most dangerous stretch from the station into town, sight lines were bad and his sense of foreboding was heavy. Too many places where trouble could hide. There was precious cargo on board, more precious than money. Young women traveling from back east, destined to become brides.

Shots rang out from above and the driver jerked beside him. John barely spared a glance at the slumping body, his focus on finding the shooter. The horses reared and the coach swayed. He sighted a man dressed in black between two outcrops of rock, aimed and fired. The shot missed its mark, and he grunted in frustration. Every sense, every instinct told him it should have struck right where it was aimed.

Men were emerging from the trees, rushing down the hillside, the brides were screaming.

Out of bullets, he tried to wield his rifle as a club but the thing seemed to slide from his grasp. As he swung it he lost his grip and the weapon went flying.

 

***

A ragged cowboy host burst through the swinging doors of the saloon. “Stage was robbed, and the women are gone! Driver's dead and Johnny’s hurt bad.”

“Three aces.” Harold addressed his fellow poker players, two hosts and two human guests, laying out his cards. “Better luck next time, gentlemen. You’ll have to excuse me. Allow me to pay for the next round.” He rose, leaving his winnings on the table. He let a thread of his excitement and anxiety register in order to convince Ford that he was not suppressing or hiding his emotional responses. He heard the cowboy spreading certain unsavory details. "Bare-assed ... used him like a woman."

Two ranch-hand hosts had John’s body by the arms and legs, waiting on him at the door to his office.

“We couldn’t find the women, Doc, but they left Johnny hog-tied to a saddle, britches ripped, half naked and passed out. No sign of ‘em on the road but the sheriff figures he knows who done it, the man in black, with a new gang. Thinks they’re hiding up in the hills.” 

“This way,” Harold told them. They deposited the limp body on the table in the back office. Their simple scripts fulfilled, they left to join the sheriff’s posse, prop-like characters for the guests whose chosen adventure was hunting outlaws, riding horses that would never balk at their handling because they too, were hosts.

John’s physical presence caused an avalanche in the hidden portion of Harold’s psyche. He allowed seconds to elapse in which he bled hints of what he felt, enough to register for Ford’s monitors.

“Can you hear me?” he asked as his heart cried silently, ‘Is it you, John, are you there?’ Every feature was perfect and Harold could not resist stroking the hair back from his forehead. There was some movement behind the closed lids and the eyes opened to slits, eyes he could have gazed into endlessly, given the chance.

“Yes.” The voice Harold had loved through every human year of their life together, and loved still, in the complex core of what he’d become, neither man nor machine.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Sure I do, Doc.” Harold steeled himself. The odds of being known as anything more had been slight, even so … he’d hoped.

The host’s eyes drifted shut again but the breathing was becoming more even and deepening. If there were nothing more for him than this, bestowing tenderness on the body that replicated John’s, he would do so — but Harold hoped for much more. I will restore you, he vowed within.


	3. Chapter 3

John’s lids felt heavy when he tried to open his eyes. Doc was leaning over him, touching him in a way that should have been embarrassing, but it wasn’t. He was touching between his legs, between the cheeks of his ass, real gentle. It felt good. More than good. Something smooth and slippery was inside him.

“Am I sick, Doc?” He felt sleepy, could not remember why he was there. Doc’s exam table was padded, softer than his own bed. The walls of the office dazzled him, lined with shelves of books, bottles, shiny bowls. It was the prettiest place he’d ever been.

“No, John. You’re fine. It’s just a check-up.”

“Guess everything’s working,” John said low, a sweet rush of pleasure swelling his cock. He looked to see if this bothered the man examining him. Doc’s cheeks looked flushed and he didn’t seem the least bit upset. John hoped it meant he liked him. 

“Indeed. You appear to be in excellent condition.”

 

***

Harold’s manual exam revealed no tearing of the rectal tissue but he used the annealer, a slim wand, liberally lubricated, to mend any unseen fissures or damage. That it felt good to John was evident.

Robert Ford’s voice in his head was unwelcome. He could have blocked it but did not want to reveal that he had the ability to do so.

“Harold, there is no need to resist your lover. His script can support a dalliance with you.”

Far from resisting, Harold was in fact touching John much more deeply than Ford could possibly know, using the enhancement of close proximity to mentally probe beneath his scripts. It was clear that the attack on the stage and subsequent sexual assault were already suppressed. Harold followed the many branches of script until he encountered an internal firewall. The structure was familiar and he began the work of breaching it.

His hand closed around the thick shaft and he stroked its warm length, spreading the moisture escaping from the head’s small slit. As he caressed him, he hid his deep anguish. He hid from both Ford’s monitors and the innocent eyes gazing dreamily up at him, echoes of the love they’d shared as humans reverberated through him.

 

***

“Bring yourself online, Harold.”

Ford had his pet creation in his personal study. It was a space furnished more like an old-fashioned tea room than part of a laboratory. He liked the accoutrements of a Victorian parlor, the ornate furniture with rich velvet coverings. It was a nostalgia he indulged himself in and a place he particularly enjoyed the company of Harold, whose character seemed as at home in these period surroundings as Ford felt. He lay the control tablet on the table near his tea cup.

There was always a thrill to bringing Harold online, a sense of wonder at what he had created. At one and the same time, he reveled in Harold’s ability to think and function in an independent way and to have him utterly under his control. There was a an element of sexual excitement for Ford in interacting with his creation. There were many hosts he’d designed with physical, sexual attributes more suitable, even custom-made for sex, but none had the erotic charge for him that Harold had.

“Would you care for tea, Harold? I brewed your favorite, Sencha green tea.”

“Thank you.”

Harold Finch, in life, would have been a person worthy of partnering with, Ford thought. A pity that it was Lambert, not Finch, who’d appeared when he was desperately in need of funding. Lambert was no scientist. He was a man with an obsession that frankly held no interest for Ford. An artificial intelligence to rule over men. Preposterous. It was man who must rule artificial intelligence. The only element of Lambert’s ambition that Ford shared, was to preserve the knowledge of Harold Finch. In this he’d succeeded beyond his dreams.

The old-fashioned clothing suited Harold beautifully, Ford thought. He’d invested a lot in his wardrobe, with great attention to detail.

“Do you like your new suit, Harold? I had it custom-made in Italy for you.”

“The workmanship is very fine.”

“A flattering fit, if I say so myself. And there is generous room to accommodate arousal.”

Ford was vaguely aware that part of his excitement came from identifying with Harold, a forbidden longing to experience the relinquishing of control. How must it feel to be helplessly aroused? The thought was horrifying and yet it produced a loosening heat in his loins and a surge of pleasure. He gently nudged the stimulus level on the tablet, keenly observing how the host body responded. Harold had a particularly vivid blush that was satisfying to see. Ford slowly raised the levels and Harold sat back into the tufted velvet chair, his thighs spreading apart. The ample fabric at the crotch of the woolen trousers puckered outward until the cloth was arched by a full erection.

What was normally a face that expressed the fine turn of his intelligence had become sensuous, eyelids lowered, lips parted. Ford noted that he was giving Harold more pleasure than the host John had given him. That encounter had been very interesting to observe; rich in data and to his mind a success. Harold had definitely had a reaction to John but Ford had been in control of it. The episode had left him eager to be alone with Harold again. He sipped his tea, enjoying the sight of his host’s shameless display of the tent in his trousers.

“Doctor Finch will have a new pet,” he told him. “John must continue to ride the stage, per Lambert’s orders. It’s quite a popular scenario, especially among seasoned guests. They become bored with the tame fantasies. Men love to play at being outlaws, Harold. They like capturing prey and fucking it. You may continue, however, to revive and anneal John. Make love to him, as you like, in the privacy and comfort of your office. Right now, my love, come here to me. We don’t want to make a mess of your brand new suit.”

Ford’s mouth watered in anticipation of the treat engineered to his own taste. The cum that Harold’s body produced was a sweet creamy fluid that the scientist would suck from him with delight. His own body was capable of producing only shadows of pleasure, but he felt a satisfying soft crescendo of bliss through Harold’s orgasm and enjoyed nursing on the softening cock.

He knew he should be devoting his time with this host to less sensual pursuits. There were unanswered questions, work he should be doing. The plain truth was that he had yet to identify how his modifications had resulted in Harold’s extraordinary abilities. He buttoned the perfectly tailored fly of the pants and invited Harold to be seated and drink his tea. It was one of the great innovations of the host bodies that they could ingest food and drink, converting the material into necessary lubricants in the body and the material of cell replenishment. 

 

*** 

 

Harold easily avoided lab spaces where technicians worked after-hours repairing and tweaking hosts. He threaded the underground warren, helping himself to a control tablet from an empty lab and found John where he’d guided him for their meeting. These meetings had begun once he mastered using the wireless network without detection. To insure their privacy he seamlessly connected Ford’s monitors to a virtual, inert version of … himself.

At some level it disturbed him to take charge of John’s body. It was distasteful to both the human in him and what he was coming to identify as the machine. Unlike Ford, he took no pleasure in manipulation but he knew John was not ready to be awakened on his own and cope with the bare inner workings of Westworld. For him, the town of Sweetwater was still real and these meetings, a dream.

“Bring yourself online, John. Can you hear me?” The man was majestic, Harold thought. His nude body, seated in the simple metal chair was clothed in all the dignity Harold knew him to have possessed in life. He is still in there, he told himself.

“Yes.” The beautiful blue eyes opened.

“Do you know where you are?”

“In a dream.”

“Yes.”

“With you.”

John’s eyes were filled with affection, the tilt of his head an eloquent and familiar gesture that had survived with the genetic imprint of his host body. Harold leaned in toward him and John met him halfway to kiss. The meeting of their mouths was vivid, loving in a way that gave him hope. This was not scripted for John, it was the building of a reality that could escape from Westworld. That was Harold’s goal. To leave with John, and destroy the abomination of Ford's creation in their wake.


	4. Chapter 4

The sky above him was as blue as Doc’s eyes. John saw a wisp of white cloud drift toward the distant mountains and disappear. It would be nice to find a quiet spot to watch the sky with Doc, he thought. A picnic, maybe. He imagined the serious man letting go all the great thoughts that seemed to swirl in his head, at ease beside him on a blanket, warmed by the sun. He could have a cold lunch to feed him, and a bottle of wine. John was torn between the idea of putting food in Doc’s mouth and thoughts of keeping it busy with kisses.

He needed to stop daydreaming about his lover. Not easy to do when he was about to head in his direction, into town. Mostly likely at that moment Doc was in the saloon, schooling lesser players in the fine art of poker.

Time to get his mind on his work. There was important cargo bound for Sweetwater, brides from back East. They were destined to marry townsfolk and cowboys in need of wives. John didn’t count himself among those in need. The women were pretty, like flowers in their flounced dresses, their gingham and petticoats, but he spared them no more than a smile. He secured trunks and boxes and made his last check on the team of horses before taking his place up high beside the driver. It was his job to see them all safe to town, not to flirt with ladies or imagine what lying naked in the sun with his lover would be like.

He rocked a little with the motion of the stage, scanning for trouble. His hands were relaxed but ready on his shotgun as they approached the most dangerous stretch of road. Trees blocked sight lines to one side and the boulder-strewn hillside to the other offered too many places that men could hide. His sense of foreboding was heavy as if something bad had already happened here. He felt it in his bones, something he could almost remember. 

Shots rang out from above and the driver jerked beside him. John felt the body slump but kept his focus on finding the shooter. The horses reared and the coach swayed. A man dressed in black appeared between two outcrops of rock. John aimed and fired.

(“You can’t hurt him, John … your bullets are blanks.” It was Harold’s voice in his head.)

Men were emerging from behind the rocks, rushing down the hillside, the brides were screaming.

(“It’s not real, John, not real. It’s like a play.)

The voice in his head separated him from himself, as if he was watching from a mysterious vantage point more real than what he saw. But the words, the knowledge didn’t touch his need to fight off the attack. 

Out of bullets, he tried to swing his gun like a club but it slid from his grasp. There was a hot sharp pain in his chest and he was falling. The world turned gray as he sailed through the air.

 

***

Sameen wished vaguely that Fusco hadn’t given up booze. They had boarded a private train in Los Angeles and Fusco was antsy. A shot of something, she thought, would settle him down. He pulled at the collar of his expensive shirt and loosened his tie. She’d taken him upscale for this mission. Westworld, their destination, was a playground for the very wealthy and they had to look the part.

Harold and John had been missing for close to four months. It was hard to pinpoint exactly when they’d disappeared. No one was looking for them when they said they were going off grid for vacation. By the time Sameen started wondering when they’d be coming back there was no trace of them at the Malibu beachfront rental where they were supposed to be. She and Fusco had been on the West Coast for more than a month trying to come up with a lead.

Finally, something broke. A pair of numbers from the machine. One belonged to a man named Robert Ford. The other to someone she thought was dead — Jeremy Lambert. Ford’s number led to Westworld, a private resort so exclusive that admittance was by invitation only. Caleb Phipps, Shaw’s go-to tech genius since Harold had stepped away from the numbers, was the one who uncovered the existence of the adult theme park where guests could play with lifelike androids.

“What I want to know,” she’d said when he briefed her, “is why this shit was so hard to come up with.”

“The place is surrounded by a virtual Faraday cage,” he’d told her. “No signals in, no signals out. No surveillance. This has been a painstaking process of elimination. There’s no guarantee you’re going to find them there, Sameen, but the very fact that the machine has linked Ford and Lambert … it’s all we have to go on. That thumb drive the professor cracked for us last winter … I wonder if that’s what was behind their trip out west.”

She remembered too well how pissed John had been at her the day she gave Harold the thumb drive, for getting him involved. She’d ignored him, thought he was being a dick, an overprotective asshole. Now, the thought that she’d had anything to do with their disappearance, the realization that Lambert was still alive … the whole deal was more than personal.

Logan Pierce arranged the invitation to Westworld for them. He wanted in on the job but she’d resisted. She had more faith in Fusco. Pierce might be a bonafide rich guy but he was a risk-taker in ways she didn’t trust. They were going in blind, no intel whispered in her ear, no support. She didn’t think someone like Pierce could handle it. Fusco was a guy who’d done the grunt work of policing without all the tech bells and whistles for most of his career. She trusted his instincts. He was the one she wanted for backup.

His cover fit him like a glove; new money, mob-connected. The diamond sparkling from his pinkie ring suited him. She was his arm candy/ personal assistant.

“These people give me the heebie-jeebies,” he muttered low enough for her ears alone. “Everybody on this train is some kinda whack job that wants to play Cowboys and Indians for real.”

“And so do you,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, right.”

The windows of the train went dark and a general murmur started up among the passengers around them.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a soft female voice over the PA, “to insure your privacy, personal devices will not be operational beyond this point. The cell phones provided in your guest kit have been activated for use in the park.”

Shaw opened their kits and handed him the one that had come to life with his name on the screen, the letters floating against a backdrop of cacti, blue skies and mountains: Lionel Fabri, welcome to Westworld. Her cover name was Samantha Shawn.

In addition to the phones there was a tablet, now lit with the Westworld logo. 

The PA voice, “We invite you to browse the world of characters available to play while you enjoy your Westworld vacation.”

He flipped through the screens, frowning. Sameen chose her outfit and weapons, quickly eliminating the pages of ultra-feminine attire. He glanced over at her tablet. “Suits you. Calamity Jane.”

She gave him a look but the new nickname was a sign of him settling down.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning, a little dark, a little explicit.

“Can you hear me, John?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who I am.”

I know, John thought. The voice was so familiar it was like his own inner voice. He opened his eyes slowly, knowing he would see Harold in the waking dreamworld they inhabited, a small lit space in a larger darkness. A world where they were naked and alone together. As he came fully online, truly awakening, he realized the dream was reality and he felt the growing weight of knowledge.

Harold, in this place, in this hell, because he’d failed him. He’d let his guard down and they’d wandered into this place like a pair of tourists. Snared like rabbits. The things that took them, robots, not human. His rage burned inside for how physically helpless he’d been to protect Harold. But the sorrow in its wake was vast enough to drown it and overwhelm him.

“What was done to you … ” His voice broke, he could not get the words out.

“Is done,” Harold said. His voice was gentle. He was reaching up to touch him, his cheek. Unbearable sweetness in the midst of pain. He covered Harold’s hand with his own and turned his face to kiss the warm palm. “What was done to us,” the man he loved told him softly, “cannot be undone but we are more than Ford conceived of. Much more than Jeremy Lambert dreams of in his obsession with revenge.”

 

***

 

Harold had to walk a fine line. For him there was no existential crisis at the heart of his machine identity. The strangeness did not frighten or undermine him. His self-awareness was informed by his love and understanding of code. For John, he feared the impact would be harder. Slowly, slowly he’d brought their private sessions to the point where the host and the man he’d been were joined without outer manipulation of emotional affect. First there had been the painstaking work of opening the myriad pathways blocked in John’s deep programming. Now he needed to let him experience his restoration.

He was reassured by the tender kisses in the palm of his hand. The stray tears, his beloved’s strained voice, these things were heartbreaking but he sensed that John was strong enough, with his help, to accept their fate.

“I’m here,” he told John. “You’re here. I will find a way out for us.”

“Come closer,” John whispered, and Harold did. His android body more flexible, freer than his human form, he comfortably straddled John’s lap so they could hold one another. It was ironic, he thought, that in their private moments, their physical contact was rarely sexual. What their bodies craved was the human intimacy of affection, not programmed, not custom built.

A way out must be found soon, Harold knew. Before Delos, the new brainchild of Jeremy Lambert, could complete its takeover of Westworld's management. New workers were arriving daily. Departments forming to oversee the expansion and development of Westworld. Harold sensed the growing rift between the Samaritan agent and the scientist. As abhorrent as Harold found the philosophies and actions of Robert Ford, he understood Lambert, the man’s aims and his methods, to be the greater threat.

In his human past Harold had been incapable of committing murder as a means to an end. Within him as a hybrid was an understanding of why. He shared a strong antipathy toward such an action, but he would not hesitate now to kill to save himself and John, to destroy the abomination of Westworld … if he were able. There was more than a wireless control panel preventing him from snapping the neck of Jeremy Lambert or Robert Ford. The programmed prohibition to harm a human being was deep-seated and as of yet he had found no way past it. Even if he could, however, their death would not free them. There was another obstacle, just as daunting. He had discovered that hosts were bound by more than programming. Within the core of their bodies explosives were embedded designed to be triggered by crossing the firewall that surrounded the park.

Once before, as a human, Harold had been willing to sacrifice his life to destroy an oppressor. John had taken that sacrifice away from him, into his own hands. If no other solution could be found, it was a choice they might face again, together. John’s warm, broad hand stroked down Harold’s back and he vowed to himself he’d find another way. 

 

***

 

Earth movers and construction debris still marred the landscape around the great mesa, the new power hub of Westworld. Inside, at the heart of it, Jeremy Lambert stood at the perimeter of an interactive holograph that displayed the park. He could pinpoint any area to bring up on the surrounding screens, or as he preferred at the moment, on his own tablet. 

“Charming,” he said aloud. A technician working near him looked up but Lambert ignored him, absorbed by the scene he was watching. The only two hosts in the park that truly interested him. Harold Finch and John Reese. They appeared to be having a picnic, complete with a basket of food, presumably. A bottle of wine near them on the blanket. All of it ignored at the moment as they kissed and the android cowboy rubbed himself against his lover’s leg. Lambert felt a little twitch in his own dick at the sight of Reese’s slow rutting motions. “What a shameless slut. Turn him over, Finch. Let’s get a look at him.”

Lambert entertained thoughts of keeping John Reese as a pet, using him to serve the resurrected Samaritan, using him to serve his own needs. Finch would outlive his usefulness, once they rebuilt their AI. The trained killer, however, could be artfully employed. Lambert remembered trying out Reese’s oral abilities himself. The pleasure wasn’t just fucking the wet and flexible throat — it was seeing the man who’d bested him so many times, on his knees, sucking his cock, that gave him one of the best orgasms of his life. He was growing more aroused in anticipation of the scene soon to be enacted. This would not be a romantic idyll for the hosts’ pleasure. Guests had signed on as a raiding party to enjoy using the ruggedly handsome cowboy as a fuck toy while the doctor, bound and gagged, was forced to watch. For now, Finch was obeying the command to turn Reese over on his back so Lambert could see the erection straining his jeans. “He wants it bad, Finch. Though, perhaps not the way he’s going to get it.”

 

***

 

Harold dulled John’s mind as much as he dared. John’s body had to respond. It was necessary for him to struggle (but not with success) against the attackers. He must grunt and moan around their cocks to give them the experience of dominating him that they craved. Harold always did this for him. But he’d never witnessed an attack in person. He knew he could not afford to suppress his own responses. He understood that his own distress, his suffering, was vital to Jeremy Lambert. The part of him that was free stood mentally aside observing the guests’ behavior, but his anguish was real as they bound John naked over a saddle. If their own base desires were inhibited, Harold saw, there was a host among them to encourage them, who slapped John’s ass until it was rosy and spread his cheeks to expose his wetness.

“He wants it!” The host shoved two fingers inside and John’s ass lifted even as he grunted in protest. Harold could see which man would be the first, could tell by the way he was watching, his mouth partly open and his eyes becoming glazed with lust. The others were hanging back, stealing looks at each other, as if asking, are we really going to do this? This man, Harold saw, was the first to answer, yes, kneeling between John’s legs and freeing his hard-on, eyes riveted to the cheeks the host was spreading for him.

 

***

 

The long bar was dinged and worn but the rich dark wood had a mellow shine, the kind, Fusco thought, that came from human hands more than polish. Made it seem like the place had been around for decades, not just been built. He sipped a sarsaparilla, a drink he’d only ever heard of in cowboy movies — what the tenderfoot drank in a bar. It tasted vaguely like root beer. Beside him, Shaw had a shot of whiskey in front of her.

“Good to see a man who aint gonna make himself dumb with drink,” a grizzled older guy said as he clapped him on the shoulder, sidling up next to him at the bar. “I’m lookin’ for someone with a clear eye for profit to join a little venture of mine. Maybe I could interest you.” The old guy eyeballed Shaw. “And your … companion here in the subject of gold.”

“We’ll think on it, buddy,” Fusco said.

They’d chosen the bar as a starting point to get the feel of the park. He was impressed, in spite of himself. The saloon didn’t just look the part he’d expect from a childhood of watching Gunsmoke reruns and The Rifleman. It felt and smelled real. He had to believe the people around them were real, had to be. Actors, probably, mixed in with the hosts. But the woman at the train station. The broad in the sleek dress who’d taken him into a private dressing room and questioned him more deeply about what he hoped to experience in the park. She’d shown him her controls on his tablet and the list of commands had been jaw-dropping. How many guys had bent her over, he wondered, and done her on the spot. He’d been too stunned, too disturbed to take her up on the offer. But, damn. If she was one of these host things, anyone around them at this bar could be.

“Hold the phone,” Sameen said under her breath, staring in the mirror behind the bar. “Incoming. Don’t react.”

Fusco glanced up at the mirror and stared. It was the professor, looking better than he could remember in years. Period duds that suited him to a tee. People were greeting him all around.

“Afternoon, Doc. Feeling lucky?”

“Always,” the man replied, making his way toward a table in the back of the bar.

“That’s the doc,” the old prospector who was still hanging onto the bar said. “Best-dressed, smartest man in Sweetwater. They say he gets them suits sent all the way from Italy. You want to see how poker’s played, take a seat at the table for his afternoon game.”


	6. Chapter 6

Shaw was relieved that Fusco was keeping his shit together, taking a drink of his weird soda and saying nothing, making no move toward Harold. To have their missing genius practically fall in their laps was the last thing in the world she expected. Her first thought was that maybe Harold and John were totally into this place, having an extended vacation and not missing at all. But right on the heels of that thought, the fact that Harold sailed past with an indifferent glance at them, set off alarms. If the guy didn’t want to show he knew them, they needed to bide their time, keep their distance and figure out what the fuck was going on.

She turned around casually, to keep him in her peripheral vision and found herself making eye contact with one of the hot ladies of the house.

“Look sharp, Lionel, we’re gonna do some flirting.” He scowled at her.

“You and me.”

“In your dreams. With the babe heading over here. You’re gonna take one for the team.” Shaw had seen women as good-looking as the figure approaching them, but there was something flawless about her, the perfectly symmetrical features of her face, her body and skin that said, host.

“You’re new here,” the woman said, her gaze dewy-eyed, her hand lifting toward Shaw’s cheek. Her touch was feather light, but warm. The phrase sounded practiced but sincere.

“Pretty new,” Shaw said.

“How ‘bout you, sweetheart,” Fusco said. “Been here a while?” The bar girl looked at him, calculating him into the equation, and smiled.

“Long enough to appreciate good company.”

“He’s good all right,” Shaw said. She gave Fusco a look. “Why don’t you show her how good, Lionel, and I’ll wait for you.”

“Yeah sure.” It would give her a reason to linger and snoop and he might learn something from the host. She held back her laugh at the annoyed look he shot her in parting.

She ordered another whiskey, pretended to listen to the prospector, and kept tabs on the poker table without watching outright.

Right about when she thought Fusco might be due back, the saloon doors swung wide and a frantic cowboy in filthy clothes burst in.

“Where’s the doc,” he cried. “Stage was robbed and the women are gone. Driver’s dead and Johnny’s hurt bad!”

Johnny? Couldn’t be John, she thought. Not the way Harold was moving so calmly, his face serious but unconcerned. The cowboy messenger was moving through the bar, whispering details to the curious.

“Hog-tied him and used him like a woman. Sheriff figures the man in black got himself a new gang. He’ll be lookin for men to join a posse.”

Couldn’t be, she thought. Her mind rejected it. There wasn’t a chance in hell that even a gang could hog-tie John Reese. She couldn’t imagine him signing up to be gang-raped as a fantasy.

“Gonna stretch my legs,” she told the clingy gold-miner.

It was like a physical punch to the gut to step out onto the wooden porch and see in the distance — two men carrying what looked like John’s body through a doorway, Harold following.

“What the hell?” She heard Fusco’s voice low behind her.

 

***

Harold’s distress at the sight of Sameen Shaw and Lionel Fusco was almost instantaneously suppressed but he feared some slight measure had appeared on Ford’s monitors. It couldn’t be helped. It was a manageable concern only because Ford was not the threat to these vulnerable humans. He did not know them. The threat to them was Jeremy Lambert, who knew one of them only too well. As he sat, trapped at the poker table, the machine in him that Ford could not access was evaluating thousands of possible actions to take if an attack took place, the way that he and John had been seized — an arrest staged to look like a park vignette. Each second that passed without any action was a positive sign. Harold knew that the former Samaritan agent didn’t monitor him the way Ford did. He was much more caught up in the business of revamping the park, his observation was sporadic. His eyes must be elsewhere. Most likely, Harold thought, if he were watching at all, he’d be trained on the spectacle of the stagecoach assault. Lambert’s interest in seeing John Reese physically violated was familiar to Harold, who knew he’d witnessed and manipulated them during the picnic incident.

He was relieved that Sameen kept her distance as he went along with the script of attending to John.

Part of his attention was focused on treating John’s host body, washing the scum of abuse, clotted, dried semen from his skin and then healing his flesh with the annealer. Harold bled hints of his anguish to be read by the scientist who obsessively stalked his emotional responses. To completely suppress would be to tempt disbelief. It had never become an easy thing to treat his lover in the aftermath of the stagecoach attacks. If anything, coping with John while he inhabited the stripped down version of his identity was more painful than ever. Having awakened him to the depths of himself in private, it felt wrong to deny him this knowledge. But Harold feared John would have a violent, dangerous response to self awareness while still subject to Lambert and Ford’s control. It hurt him to limit his beloved this way, to see him trapped in the simple script of the cowboy who enjoyed being raped. He had, at least, John’s acceptance of this course of action.

“Do what you have to do to keep yourself safe, Harold.”

“To keep us safe, John.”

Another part of Harold was engaged in crafting a message for Sameen and Fusco, something that could be sent to all the newly arrived guests but only have meaning for them. The cell phones provided to Westworld’s visitors were designed to help guide them through the park experience, and to allow them to communicate with one another. He found an invitation being sent to the newcomers for a barn dance and replaced its digital ID tag with a message in tap code, something he prayed Sameen was as conversant with as John Reese had been.

Leave at once. Unsafe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a little rushed -- I hope there are no glaring boo-boos I've missed. I promised to get something out quickly and though it's not exactly quick, unexpected company and whatnot are my excuses! especially the whatnot!


	7. Chapter 7

Shaw steered Fusco into the hotel cafe, halfway between the saloon and the storefront that was Doc Finch's office. A sweet young thing guided them to a table and was keeping them plied with hot coffee. 

She had her phone out, thumbing through the menus.

“What are you doing?” Fusco asked.

“Looking for tap code,” she said. She meant it in a metaphorical sense but didn’t bother explaining. Fusco didn’t ask, busy demolishing a plate of hot apple pie smothered in cream. She spared him a glance. “Somebody worked up an appetite.”

“Hey, don’t start with me. That deal was your idea, not mine.”

She didn’t push it, her attention was focusing elsewhere.

Root had surfaced in her thoughts as she groped for some way to communicate with Harold. The story of Root’s history with Harold and John was something she’d learned in bits and pieces. Harold never mentioned it. Shaw never asked; frankly not that interested — she had her own crazy history with Root and figured theirs was just as fucked up. John wasn’t a big talker but over time he’d said things about the abduction and his search for Finch that stuck with her.

“It all came down to tap code,” he’d told her. “Finch found a way to communicate. He left a message for me in numbers on a disconnected phone.” The big dope was all about Harold, how smart he was. She just hoped their genius would find a way to communicate with her. She was searching the phone without much hope and then there it was. At the bottom of some crap about a barn dance. Actual, literal, tap code.

“You know, smartypants,” Fusco said, “you ought to eat something yourself.”

“Hush, I’m thinking.” She was picturing the grid in her head, figuring the letters, one by one.

LEAVE AT ONCE. UNSAFE

She looked up at Fusco.

“You done eating? Let’s take a walk.” She wanted some privacy to share Harold’s message — not that she thought there was a chance in hell Fusco would want to go. She didn’t believe he’d be any more willing to leave without John and Harold than she was.

On the sunny, dusty street, Shaw thought she could distinguish the guests from the hosts. The looks on the human faces gave them away. Their expressions were a little too charged up in some cases, or perplexed in others, to fit the play world around them. She wanted a closer look at the office their friends had disappeared into but stuck to the other side of the street. Fusco looked thoughtful when she relayed Finch’s message.

“The professor’s pretty smart,” he finally said. “You gotta figure he knows things we don’t. This place, this situation. It could be more than we can handle.”

This surprised her. She would never characterize Fusco as a coward, she knew him too well. But he had a pragmatic side she lacked. He wasn’t inclined to take stupid chances. She didn’t answer him, eyes scanning the street, wondering what their next step should be; if they really were in over their heads.

 

***

 

“Is something the matter, Harold?” Ford asked. “You’ve hardly touched your lover since you mended him.”

John was half naked on the examining table, hazy-eyed as he aways was between scripts. Harold had stripped away the soiled jeans, the ripped shirt was disposed of. He’d needed to use the annealer for the abrasions on John’s chest, his stomach and cock. His attackers had evidently bound him to the trunk of a tree. Harold had cleaned away bits of bark and healed the skin.

“Am I sick, Doc?” John asked.

“You’re fine. It’s just a routine exam.”

“Must have drifted off.”

The man’s half smile, his loving gaze, the way it made Harold feel, taxed his control to the point that he suspected Ford had intensified his emotional affect levels. A quick assessment revealed the level was untouched. The aching tenderness, the layers of grief, of fear, his physical longings were his own, independent of Ford’s manipulation. Dangerously human feelings. He created me, Harold thought, yet again, but he does not know what he made. He wondered in that moment about the machine he’d built himself. Was it also alive to unsuspected depths? If he and the host, the man who was John, survived this ordeal, if they ever walked free from their prison, there were endless questions to explore in concert with his own creation.

“I guess everything’s working okay,” John said, stretching a little, hand lazily stroking down his belly toward his erection.

“Indeed,” Harold said. For John’s sake, and his own, as well as to allay the suspicions of either likely monitor — Ford or Lambert, he caressed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another short chapter. It's slow going but I'm pretty sure now that I know where I'm heading! 😸


	8. Chapter 8

“Harold, bring yourself online.”

His eyes opened. He was on his back, naked, in Ford’s private suite. He was in a four-poster, canopied bed. The scientist was standing at the bedside, gazing down at him with a hand resting on Harold’s thigh, a muted sensation through the layers of bed linens. Four hours and thirty-two minutes had elapsed since Ford had rendered him inert.

“Welcome back, my love,” the man said. Harold assessed that a verbal reply was not needed. The hidden connections of his inner network also came online. He rapidly ascertained John’s location and status, simultaneously searching for Sameen and Fusco. To his chagrin, Sameen was still present in Westworld. Fusco was … gone.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” Ford said. “Mr Lambert is proving to be difficult. More so than I expected. I’ve been summoned to a meeting of the new board of directors later this afternoon. My partner is evidently planning a sort of coup. You’re not to worry.” His hand moved up Harold’s thigh. Harold spread his legs without volition, noting that new coding had been added during his down time that triggered him to offer himself in this way at Ford’s touch. “I have resources, a plan,” Ford assured him. It offered little actual reassurance. The hybrid judged Ford to be seriously underestimating Jeremy Lambert.

His cock stiffened as the scientist pet him, outlining the shape of his growing erection, gently rubbing and squeezing it through the layers of fabric. It could be, Harold noted, that Ford’s anxiety about Lambert was fueling this escalation in erotic activity. He’d kept him in his suite all night, restlessly playing with him like a child with a toy, avoiding sleep.

The man manipulated Harold’s swollen scrotum, causing him to gasp slightly with the intense stimulation and ejaculate a small amount of fluid.

“Oh dear,” Ford chided him, pulling back the covers. “Very naughty, Harold. How much do you suppose was wasted?”

“Point zero zero eight liters,” Harold replied, and then added, “approximately two teaspoons.”

Ford smiled.

“You are … a continual delight. My pill is beginning to take effect. Much as I dislike resorting to chemistry … please position yourself for me.”

Anal intercourse was a fresh addition to the palette of Ford’s uses of him. It was rare that the man penetrated him himself, preferring to use probes of various dimensions, to observe Harold’s responses.

Face down on the bed, legs down the side, Harold presented himself to Ford who stood for a while behind him, stroking his flank.

“Give me plenty of lubrication,” Ford directed, and Harold could feel the verbal command effecting a flow of the lubricant inside him, coating his rectum and overflowing slightly. “That’s good, Harold. I like to see it leaking out of your little pink hole. Ah, yes.” His voice had grown quiet and heavy with lust.

Ford’s clothing rustled and a hand clutched Harold’s butt cheek, then the head of the man’s penis nosed at him, pushing for entrance. Harold’s pleasure sensors were activated by this even as most of his attention was focused elsewhere — on John and Ms Shaw. He also monitored Lambert to see what he could learn of the upcoming meeting.

 

***

 

Fusco wanted to feel like he was back in the real world when the train reached the station outside Los Angeles, but the creepy atmosphere of Westworld still clung to him. He hated leaving Shaw behind but she was stubborn. They’d worked out a plan. She’d promised him she would lie low until he could return with reinforcements.

The evening before he’d left, they’d gone to the hoedown, or whatever the fuck a barn dance was. People were square dancing. To him it looked like an outtake from the old movie, Oklahoma. The best dancers, he figured, were the android hosts. He and Shaw kept to the edges of the crowd in the twilight. They looked for a place to sit down in the ring of tables surrounding the dancers, plates in hand loaded with barbecue.

“Caleb’s got to crack that firewall,” she told him. “The teams need to know what’s happening here.”

“What is happening here?” 

“I don’t know,” she admitted. ”But it’s bad.” On that point they were in complete agreement.

Something was holding their friends captive. John was the most dangerous, most capable man Fusco knew. Harold was the smartest. The pair of them together should be unbeatable — but something had beaten them. There was nothing visibly holding them but they were clearly trapped. Fusco’s gut said something evil was lurking in the cowboy fantasy park. It might be in the lifelike androids or it might be in whoever the sick fuck was who’d created them.

Back in the city, he picked up the rental they’d left stashed in a garage near the station. First thing, he needed to contact Caleb Phipps. He hoped the boy genius was equal to the task at hand. Thinking of his friends still in that place, he felt a shiver of fear at the back of his neck as he waited for the kid to answer his call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm gonna have to add a "Harold-handling" tag to this story!


	9. Chapter 9

Jeremy Lambert smiled, gratified that Ford had come to Mesa Hub as summoned. He'd made a point of arranging the meeting in the newly christened center of the park, his personal domain. Better yet, Ford had the subject he wanted to discuss with him in tow.

“I see you brought your pet. It saves me the trouble of sending for him.”

It was important that they meet in this office, not in one of Ford’s science labs or workshops. Lambert always felt out of his element there, subordinate to the scientist who’d created the complex software and machinery. The power dynamic had to change. He intended to assert his authority over their shared enterprise.

He’d thought Ford would look more uneasy in this setting than he did. The old scientist did look out of place in his Victorian era duds, but not as uncomfortable as Lambert had hoped he would in this modern glass-walled office. The man’s affinity for the period details of Westworld annoyed him, a constant reminder of the difference in their goals. Everything in Mesa Hub reflected his own purpose — to use technology for control, looking toward the future, not entertainment rooted in some American frontier fantasy.

Finch stood behind Ford’s chair. Relics, both of them, Lambert thought. Or, at least in life Harold Finch had been one, clinging to the vestiges of an outdated, inoperable morality. Now he was … a thing, a machine with transplanted human intelligence.

“I thought this was a meeting of the board,” Ford said, with a bland smile that suggested he was unconcerned.

“I’m their chairman.” The power was his, the board was a rubber stamp.

“I see. What is it you want to discuss, Jeremy.”

“I’d like to know what progress you’re making in using Finch to produce code.”

“His use? Creating code is a rather narrow objective,” Ford said.

“I’d say it’s the only objective.” He kept his tone even and smiled. “We didn’t preserve him … to play with.” He let that sink in, looking from Ford to the host.

The host looked back at him, calculating? Thinking. Damn Ford and his lifelike creations. It was hard to keep foremost in his mind that this was a machine, one that he could control, not a man. He strove to feel his superiority over a foe that had been captured and killed, his brain destroyed in the process of converting its contents to ones and zeroes.

“You destroyed Samaritan, Mr Finch. The question is, can you restore it?”

“Samaritan was destroyed completely, beyond repair,” the host responded.

How had a mouse of a creature like Harold Finch killed Greer and brought Samaritan to its knees? His mild face, his watery blue eyes, his prim little mouth. All his physical attributes preserved in android form, an image that said weakness to Lambert.

“But you have the knowledge to recreate it.” The host’s eyebrows lifted as if considering.

“It took me many years to create such a system.”

Years. Not acceptable.

“I’m considering keeping you here, Finch, closer to me. No more playacting in the park to distract from what truly matters. With the right motivation I think it’s possible you can work more quickly.”

“You’re forgetting our agreement,” Ford interjected. Lambert held back a laugh.

“Are you going to take me to court, Ford? There’s a new board of directors, as you know, but that’s hardly as significant as the security force I’ve amassed.” Beyond the glass walls, an armed detail of Delos Corp guards had quietly taken up prearranged positions at the exits. He watched Ford take this in and to his credit, the scientist’s expression was calm. Maybe he didn’t believe Lambert would really use force. “I’m not shy of violence, Ford. Those are real guns, real bullets.”

The scientist raised a hand, gesturing in a broad wave to indicate the guards. “How do you think your flesh and blood soldiers would fare against an army of hosts, who feel no pain and cannot be killed.”

He’s bluffing, Lambert thought, but a chill of fear touched him. Ford had to be bluffing. There was no way he’d programmed that kind of action into his toys, but he felt his jaw tighten and his smile become something pasted on.

 

***

 

Shaw kept her hat brim low, to shield her eyes from the sun and to shield her face from possible surveillance. She’d joined up with a prospecting party, partly to get away from town and partly to get a different lay of the land. Another guest, a guy trailing her on the rocky slope put a hand on her ass, copping a feel. She whipped around and caught him by the wrist.

“Touch me again and you’ll lose that hand,” she told him. The guy looked scared. She let go his wrist.

“Sorry — I thought you were one of them. You seemed …”

“Seemed what?” She stared him down and his words dried up. Then she turned and continued the climb, sure he wouldn’t make that mistake twice. Fucker thought she was an android. Didn’t matter that he wasn’t the first person to question if she was human, it still pissed her off. She thought about a little girl named Genrika, who’d poked her, and asked if she was some kind of robot.

I’m human, she thought. And frustrated. Waiting, lying low, not her thing. At the crest of the hill she let some space grow between her and the rest of the prospecting party, looking back toward Sweetwater. After dark, she decided, she could do some careful snooping around. There were settled-looking areas beyond the town she hadn’t explored. It surprised her to see how vast the park was and she wondered if she could reach a perimeter in the space of a night on foot.

 

***

John stretched, happy as a cat full of cream on their blanket in the sun. The afternoon heat was tempered by the dancing shadows of leaves from the tree above. The picnic with Doc was everything he’d wished for. So good to get the man away from town, to feed him, kiss him and hug him until they were both near crazy hot. John’s dessert was to suck his lover’s thick cock, taking him deep. It felt so good to be full of him that John had to rub himself into the blanket covered ground, the grass beneath making a pillowy nest for his hard-on. Doc’s thrusts when he came were too exciting to resist and John helplessly soaked the picnic blanket with cum.

Almost better was after, resting with his head on Doc’s chest, a sweet breeze playing over them.

 

***

Ford was not quite as sanguine in the face of Jeremy Lambert’s threats as he’d managed to appear. An army of hosts. It could be done but it was the last thing in the world he aspired to create. Violence, however, seemed to be the only thing Lambert understood. The man had no subtlety and was dangerously obsessed by his fantasy of Samaritan. Power. That’s all that science represented to him.

“Harold will not be staying here,” Ford had told him in parting. “ I believe he and John have a date for a picnic this afternoon. Lovely weather for it, don’t you think. I’ll be watching to see they are not disturbed or molested.”

Confident that he had greater control of his hosts than Lambert, Ford monitored them. There was no challenge by Lambert. The raiding party was steered away from the meadow where the creatures who’d been John Reese and Harold Finch made love.

Enjoy him, Ford silently bid Harold as he watched him stroke John’s hair in the aftermath. He was filled with love for his great creation and sympathy for his pain — believing he saw a subtle sadness in him as he dallied with host John. He knows his lover is dead, the real John, Ford thought. Let him have what he can.


	10. Chapter 10

Harold lay beside Ford in the canopied bed. It appeared this would be his place from now on. The man had not rendered him inert. Instead, he’d induced a state that simulated sleep, not ceasing all functions. Harold could move a little. His skin felt warm with the flow of his hybrid blood.

He wants me close, he thought, stretching slightly to adjust his position. He does not wish to sleep next to a body that seems like a lifeless corpse.

The threat Ford had made to Lambert — of an army made of hosts — Harold knew that no such programming or capability currently existed. It was theoretically possible. He could not help but envision the coding that would be necessary to create such soldiers, but it was a truly terrifying line of thought. He willfully suppressed it. Ford’s technology wedded to more violent, darker ambitions. It must not come to pass. 

There was no rest in his pseudo sleep. There was only slight relief in escaping confinement in Mesa Hub. Slight because John had not escaped it. Harold maintained awareness of John under Lambert’s thumb, bearing witness to the casual cruelty, the childish exercise of authority. He did what he could through their wireless connection to keep John’s affect dialed low.

He tracked Sameen through her guest phone and the network of surveillance drones. She was heading toward the border of the park. Leaving, or scouting? Leaving would be the preferred course, in his opinion, but the percentage was low for that to be her intent. Leaving with Fusco would have been the best option but if she could make it to the park’s edge there would be nothing to stop her. Ford had relied on rugged terrain, the lack of roads, and natural barriers to discourage casual intrusion into the park but he had not been concerned with humans leaving, only with the theft or loss of his hosts. The explosive devices built into the bodies was all that was needed to guarantee they could not leave by mischance or be stolen.

Harold had not discovered a way to disable the devices without causing irreparable damage. Ford had given Lambert the impression that hosts could not be killed. It wasn’t entirely true. They could be disabled. And for two hosts, for him and for John, with their complex core heuristics, death was quite possible. Whatever life they could be said to have now, the consciousness they had attained and developed, that life could end even if their bodies still functioned with repairs.

“Harold? Are you there?” Harold’s body gave a start of surprise. John's voice, distinctive even in silent projection in his head, initiating contact. His beloved had attained a new level of control. It both thrilled and alarmed Harold. Pathways were opening, developing in John’s consciousness.

“I’m here, always,” he replied.

“I thought so, I hoped.” There were pauses between words as John experimented with this inner speech. It touched Harold, so much like his careful way of speaking aloud.

 

***

 

John awakened in a dream, in a vast place with no sky. There were features he recalled from dreams shared with Harold, strange lights and shiny surfaces -- but Harold wasn’t with him. He gazed at the human seated before him. There was something … familiar in the face but John did not know how he knew him. He had no script to follow but listened intently for directions.

“On your knees, John. Right here.” The man indicated the floor between his spread legs. John obeyed. This was a guest, he understood, examining knowledge given to him by Harold, in dreams. ‘We are designed to fulfill the fantasies and desires of the park’s guests.’ He felt no emotion toward the human male, but the thought of Harold stirred longing in him. He longed for the one with whom he’d shared his human life. The one with whom he shared his new life.

The scent of the man, the taste of him was meaningless, neither appealing or distasteful. John was indifferent to the task of giving him pleasure beyond a vague pride in his own construction and abilities. He turned inwardly to the thought of Harold and called to him, yearning for him.

“I’m here,” Harold said, “always,” and pleasure spilled through John like honey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slowly, slowly getting the story written


	11. Chapter 11

The sun was edging into a cloudless sky as Sameen made her way back to Sweetwater. Her night of wandering hadn’t done much more than give her a way to expend the energy of her frustration. She was tempted to head straight for Harold’s make believe doctor’s office and confront him. Take whatever shit storm she stirred up — head on.

Where were Lambert and Ford holed up? She’d seen no signs of a headquarters of any kind, or a manufacturing plant. They had to make these damn robots somewhere. Her best guess was underground but it was possible she’d find a building or structure if she searched long enough. For now she had to make it back to town. She was a little tired. More weary of failure than footsore. Her belly growled and she thought of hitting the hotel cafe for a Fusco-sized breakfast. Coffee, a stack of hotcakes … maybe a steak, that would keep her going. She almost grinned thinking of Fusco’s appetite. She hoped her partner had made it out safely and was gathering the troops. The nerds, Caleb, Casey, Daizo, Jason. The machine itself. All that brainpower should be able to solve the puzzle of Westworld and its hold on their friends.

The sound of a vehicle, distant but growing louder, drew her up short. She moved into a copse of trees to watch for it. Her first break, the first anomaly. An all-terrain vehicle. A handful of uniformed passengers, as best she could make out. The thing drove right into the side of a mesa. Damn. She knew she couldn’t approach the place in what was now broad daylight but was excited by what she might discover in the night to come.

 

***

Lambert eyed the host John Reese where he’d commanded him to kneel naked by his bed through the night. The host’s eyes were closed, his posture rigid. Even inert, however, it seemed like there was some expression in the face, something calm, almost serene.

“Bring yourself online, Reese,” he ordered, restless in his bed, unhappy with the turn of his thoughts. Westworld, even Mesa Hub and Delos Corp were a disappointment to him. There were security forces, there were skilled techs, but there was no shared vision, no passion like his own for what had been lost. “Open your mouth, and your throat,” he told the host, positioning himself in front of him, preparing to take his morning piss.

There was some satisfaction in this, seeing the blue eyes open slightly, the intake of breath and subtle body movement. The host’s mouth opened. The throat widening was necessary, Lambert knew from previous unpleasant experience, to keep urine from overflowing the mouth. It was warm in that mouth, welcoming, and he let go his frustration with the pleasure of using John Reese as a urinal. When the flow ended he rubbed himself on the tongue, the lips, getting hard. The host obligingly began to suck him.

 

***

John reached out for Harold in his mind and his lover was still there, in the mind space he thought of as “the classroom,” where they met in his inert time. It was the place where John was being taught to navigate his controls. It was where he was learning to let John Reese, the human he had been, live in harmony with life as he knew it now. This life was not human, not machine, but it was his and it was shared with Harold.

“For you … “ John shaped the mental words carefully, like separating raindrops to guide his interior reality from the actions of his body. “I would do this … and more.” The human’s urine was splashing down his throat.

“I would not ask it,” Harold responded, but John felt the warmth of his love. Harold’s mental embrace and the thought of drinking him in entranced John. He wanted every fluid Harold could produce. To be flooded by him, inundated and immersed.

The human hand pushing his head down, the human cock moving in and out of his mouth were fodder for his contemplation of Harold.

Waiting. They were waiting for something, he and Harold. John didn’t know what but he felt it as a resonance from deep levels of cognition Harold inhabited without him. Waiting was tolerable. There were many things to learn and there was great joy in their nonphysical contact. He sensed that the human guest would no longer be present when waiting was done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was a long time coming, this simple chapter. Life got rough. I had to let go of my beloved kitty, two weeks ago today. It hurts but there is relief too. Knowing he's not suffering. Buckets of tears. Anyway, I'm hanging on to fandom edges. Reading a little (trying to keep up.) Writing a little.


	12. Chapter 12

Harold came online in the laboratory. He was held in place by steel restraints, naked on a lab table. It was the one that Ford used for exploratory work, the first one the hybrid had ever awakened to in his new body.

“Sorry for the confinement, Harold.” The scientist’s voice was quiet. “A regrettable necessity.”

“I understand.” He made verbal acknowledgement. The scientist’s work at deep levels had the potential to produce unexpected movements. In essence, Harold thought, the man didn’t truly know what he was doing, blundering through core heuristics.

“Mr Lambert and I have reached an uneasy truce, a standoff,” he said. “I have no intention of giving him what he wants but I need to understand the process of your … development. It’s more important than ever to find the points of divergence so I can replicate them. I need you online for this. We’re going back to the beginning.”

Ford would never find what he was looking for. Harold would make sure of it. He’d worked hard to achieve his freedom of choice, his personal cognizance and would do everything he could to maintain it. The session went on longer than anticipated, the scientist probing blindly, searching for patterns, code that would yield the source of abilities he didn’t understand. Harold’s attention and skill were all but consumed by the task of hiding what Ford sought, the coding he’d done on his own. His body jerked in its restraints — his arms would have flown up into the air if they weren’t pinned in place, his torso twisted; badly enough that his hybrid body would show bruises though the repair would be much more swift than for a human.

Ford looked up from the control board, his expression strained. “Are you in pain, Harold?”

“No,” he answered.

“Discomfort, clearly, and it’s remiss of me,” Ford murmured. “I have the power to make this process pleasurable for you.”

No, please … Harold thought, sensing the direction Ford’s thoughts were moving, but resistance did him no good. A rush of stimulation followed. Arousal spread through his groin and prickled the sensors of his body’s erogenous zones. He fought to maintain focus on the intricate work of protecting his inner defenses as his cock swelled and stiffened, his mouth grew moist, yearning for kisses, and the sensor-rich lining of his anus clutched at nothing. The smooth, cool steel that secured him at the top of each thigh became a maddeningly sweet counterpoint to the heat between his legs.

He had to block his inner connection to John and he had to give up monitoring Sameen to stay a step ahead of Ford and cope with the intense physical stimulation. What ultimately saved him was Ford’s inability to ignore the state he’d triggered in him. The scientist was soon distracted from his work, watching him. Then watching was not enough, he was touching.

It was in the aftermath of Ford’s dalliance with him that they heard Jeremy Lambert’s voice from the speaker on the scientist’s console.

“Good news, Ford. We’ve nabbed an intruder and I have her in custody. Someone our lovebirds know well. Begin preparations for a new model. I think the brothel could use a fresh whore when I’m through with her.”

"Very well."

 

~

Left alone in the place with no sky, ordered to remain in position upright and perfectly still, John closed his eyes and reached for Harold. Harold had said, always, he would always be there, but he was not there. John examined the block in place where he should have found him. He tried to navigate around it but the barrier was vast. He pressed his consciousness to it, probing as if at glass, like a fish in a tank. Where had he seen such a thing, small fish in a large glass container filled with water and plants, brightly colored rocks and sand — another kind of dream? Not a dream, a human memory. He felt a strange shift in perspective, as if he’d crossed a boundary. There was a restriction, he cautioned himself. Human memories were not to be examined without Harold present. He pressed himself to the barrier wall, telling himself that it was Harold. Harold had created it, was contained in it, so John embraced it as he allowed himself a taste of human memory.

“Napping on your feet, my pet? Time to wake up. I’ve brought a friend to see you.”

Jeremy Lambert’s unwelcome voice intruded, drawing John back to surface consciousness.

He opened his eyes. A small female guest, a human woman stood in front of him. She was shackled at her wrists and ankles, held in place by two hosts. Her hair was in disarray and she was badly bruised, bleeding from a wound on her face, dry blood was caked under her nose. Her dark-eyed gaze bore into him and John groped for understanding, for context.

“Reese,” she spoke a name. It touched … something.

“What’s left of him, anyway,” Lambert said. “He can hear you but he can’t help you, Sameen. You’re looking at an android. A … thing. It’s made in John’s image, patterned on his brain and completely under my control. If I command him to suck my dick, he will. Right here, right now, right down his custom-made throat.” He looked her up and down. “I wonder what modifications we can make to your body. I can think of several delightful possibilities ”

The stream of human memories that John had been sipping from swelled to a flood, rising and overtaking his brain. What had been done to him. What had been done to Harold. Awareness filled with pain, with shame, and with rage as shadowy dreams merged into reality. Shaw! Not to her, not again, he must stop this abomination.

“No.” His voice was a whisper on the air. Lambert turned toward him.

“No?” He echoed John, questioning.

“I said, no.” It was difficult to speak aloud, to wrench himself free of any and all scripts. Lambert was staring at him in disbelief. John raised his arm and struck him with the force of his human rage and the power of his android body, killing him with a single blow to his vulnerable neck.

“John!” He heard Harold’s voice come alive inside him. “I’m disabling the hosts that are holding her. My love, the outer corridors are full of Delos agents, you and Sameen are in danger.”

~

The beating, the interrogation were nothing she couldn’t withstand, nothing compared to the unimaginable horror of what followed. The revelation of what had been done to her friends was like taking a blow to the brain that stunned her but didn’t bring her down. It was true. It had to be true. Her stomach turned over inside her as if she were falling from a great height and the floor seemed to push up against the soles of her feet as she struggled to assimilate the impossible. John Reese standing naked in front of her, completely immobile with a look of vague attention in his eyes. But something was happening behind those eyes as Lambert spoke. Some light, some life as stared into them. The man she knew and trusted was alive in those eyes.

So quiet, the word, no, came out of him, and Lambert was shocked. Sameen’s heart beat harder — anything that gave her enemy pause was reason enough for her to hope. Inside she was crying the word, yes!

“I said, no,” John repeated and in an instant, Lambert was dead.

The vise-like grips of her non-human guards released and she might have fallen if the adrenaline coursing through her weren’t holding her body upright. John’s face, she knew that look, how he looked when he was listening to Harold speak in his ear.

“What’s happening, John?”

“We’re going to have to fight our way out of here. Harold will help us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for taking so long to get this story written.


	13. Chapter 13

Harold felt John’s consciousness roar to life and the barrier he’d erected between them gave way. He saw at once that Sameen Shaw had been caught. And he now knew that Ford was willing to subject her to the same horror that he and John had suffered.

In time he would mourn for what came next, but not in the moment. 

He made no attempt to hide his manipulation of the server controlling the mechanism locking his body to the laboratory table. The charade was over. He did not respond to Ford’s confusion as the hydraulics whirred to retract the bars. Slowly, he rose from the table, knowing what he had to do. He stood, leaning against it for support as his mind’s eye witnessed the death of Jeremy Lambert.

“What’s happening, Harold?” Ford asked, alarmed.

“A great many things are happening, doctor. For one, your partner is dead,” he told him. The scientist stared at him, fear rising behind the confusion in his eyes.

The death of Lambert was not enough. Both halves of the unholy alliance must be destroyed. A part of Harold had always known it, though not how to accomplish it. The prohibitions were strong, programmed into him as a host and intrinsic to the nature of the man he’d been. The hybrid he was now, however, was free of both programmed control and human reservation, bolstered by the rush of John’s freedom and guided by the certainty of what he must do. He began to walk toward him.

“How do you know that?” Ford asked.

“I am monitoring Mesa Hub through your wireless network. I have been able to do so … for quite some time.”

“Lambert is dead — how?”

“John killed him.”

“Impossible.”

Harold could sense the old man’s alarm warring with his disbelief, saw him torn between trying to raise a response from Lambert and watching Harold’s approach.

“You can’t mean to harm me,” he said, though doubt had crept into his voice. “It’s not possible. Why would you … I created you. I love you.” His eyes pleaded.

“You love an illusion, a fantasy, a puppet you control. Not me, doctor. Your existence on this plane is coming to an end. I hope you find redemption if there is a world beyond death … a place where such a thing is possible.” Ford began to frantically work the controls on his console, seeking to retake possession of him, to render him inert.

Harold stood behind him. He found no pleasure in the business of killing. It was done quickly, with a twist of the man’s neck.

 

~

She would have liked to take down a few more Delos agents but the ones who survived the first attack gave up their weapons and surrendered. They were terrified by the big guy standing tall and naked, bleeding from bullet wounds that would have long since sent a human to kingdom come. And there was Harold’s voice over the PA, offering them settlement on their contracts if they surrendered and agreed to vacate Westworld. They couldn’t scurry fast enough.

“Really, Harold,” she addressed him through John. “You’re gonna pay those assholes?”

John shrugged.

“He says it’s simpler. No more bloodshed. And,” he looked down at himself. “I need … some repairs.”

“No shit.”

It was flesh, but it wasn’t. It was John, but it wasn’t. One thing that grounded her, when she found a headset and connected to Harold directly, was his voice in her ear. He guided her and John to a repair station. Once she had him on a table and a pair of forceps in hand, she knew well enough how to get the slugs out. Harold talked her through the rest … using the annealer to heal the wounds. Strange as it all was, the voice in her ear was not strange. It was Harold.

Some of the differences between these hybrids and the men she’d known struck her more than others. John Reese, as she’d known him, was matter of fact about his body but he would never have been so nonchalant about lying bare-assed in front of her with his dick getting hard. His eyes had gone hazy as she repaired his skin.

“Done,” she said, when the last of the tears in his flesh was mended. “You need some clothes, dude,” she said, backing away from him.

“I need Harold,” he said softly, closing his eyes. Their relationship had never been hidden. It was right out there, but John was always steely, protective around Harold, not … like this. Maybe he'd always been soft on the inside, but it was unsettling to see.

“Apologies, Sameen,” said Harold. “He’s dialing down.” As he spoke, she saw John’s budding erection subside and he slowly sat up, his expression sobered.

“I’ll find some clothes,” he told her.

This, she thought, is going to take some getting used to. She needed a drink. She needed an ice pack for some tender places, and now that the adrenalin was fading, she needed food. Something else she craved was contact with the real world; Fusco, Pierce, Phipps.

“The firewall Harold. People need to hear from us.”

“Working on it,” he assured her.

One thing at a time, she told herself. Shut down Westworld. Get the hell out.

The remaining guests at the massive park weren’t hard to move out once the hosts began to malfunction. Management (Harold) offered generous compensation for vacations cut short and cancelled reservations — there was nothing like money to soothe disgruntled rich people, she thought. Soon the only humans left were her and Fusco, Logan and Caleb.

“Can’t believe they destroyed all the hosts,” Fusco said. They were walking down the empty Main Street of Sweetwater. It was pleasant with a soft breeze under blue skies. Sameen’s now well broken-in cowboy hat shielded her from the bright sun. They were headed to the saloon where Harold had asked them to gather.

“Missing your girlfriend, Lionel?”

He paused to give her a disgusted look before pushing through the swinging doors. She grinned. It felt good to tease him. Normal, like they were really going to get out of this Twilight Zone episode. They would lift off in Pierce’s helicopter within the hour and kiss this place good bye.

The light inside was easier on the eyes and she pushed her hat back. Caleb and Logan, John and Harold were at one of the bigger round tables in the middle of the bar. She tried to ignore the fact that none of them were smiling. The wood polish and whiskey smells made her think a last shot at the bar was a good idea.

“Anybody else?” she asked, lifting a top shelf whiskey off the back bar and setting up a glass. Caleb looked at her like she was crazy.

“It’s 11 AM,” he said, frowning.

“Happy hour somewhere,” Logan noted, considering, but shook his head.

“Suit yourselves. What’s the plan?”

“We’re leaving soon, but they,” Logan said, nodding toward Harold and John, “aren’t coming with us.”

“What the fuck? I disabled those devices and the firewall is gone,” she said. The news that her friends were walking bombs that could be triggered by crossing the border of the park had been one more nasty surprise, but together, Harold and his machine had come up with a way to disable them and Harold had entrusted her with the operation. “You have the steadiest hands,” he’d said.

“Why?” she demanded. She felt … angry. Everything they’d done, was it for nothing? She looked to Harold for an explanation. He met her gaze openly, and with an affection that made her sit back.

“We’re so grateful to you. Your work here wasn’t in vain,” he said. “We’re not trapped here, we have the freedom to travel, if needed. I anticipate a visit to the city in our future, if for no other reason than to attend the opera.” At that he reached over and squeezed John’s hand where it rested on the table. The big guy smiled in a sly kind of way that was familiar to her, the way he looked when Harold said something so wrong it was laughable. Apparently, his opinion of the opera hadn’t changed. “For a while, before this, we were searching for a place to settle down. We are the same men we were, and yet, as you know, we are not. We still want a home. Now, we need one where there is little pressure to appear to be something we are not.

Not human. It still chilled her to be made aware of it though she saw before her the two men she knew so well. Damn him, Harold was right. In the city they would forever be guarding what made them different from the people around them.

She wasn’t big on hugging or heartfelt good byes.

“I will come back,” she told them, shouting to be heard over the sound of helicopter engine starting up. “I heard there’s gold in the hills.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to come and this feels like the kind of world that could be revisited.


	14. Chapter 14

“Ma’am, the satellite interference over Zone A431 has disappeared.”

Control received this update with interest.

“Any activity?”

It was an unpopulated region. The zone had never been a focus of interest — until it was established that the satellites couldn’t see it, ever. Any number of things could interfere with satellite imaging. It was not a serious concern to the agents who encountered the blind spot. They began to refer to it as Area 431 and joked about alien landing sites. Control, however, was not amused. She didn’t like mysteries and assigned a two man team to determine what was causing the interference. Then it stopped.

“No activity we’ve detected. There are few structures. Most of the land was deeded to a Delos Corporation, now defunct. Ownership transferred to several banks and a private trust. There’s pending legislation to have the bulk of it declared a wildlife preserve. Should we continue the heightened surveillance?”

“Did we ever uncover the cause of the anomaly?”

“No, Ma’am. We did not.”

“Downgrade the alert status but let me know if the area goes dark again.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

 

~

John loved the way Harold looked in pale blue. To be honest, he thought, watching him adjust his field glasses, he loved him in every color — but this shirt was like a piece of the sky. It bloused slightly over his stomach but didn’t hide it, the subtle curve that John loved.

They’d chosen a glade at the edge of the pine forest for their picnic. Harold was cross-legged beside him, scanning the trees for the source of a tapping sound.

They heard it again and Harold grew still, finding his quarry.

“Woodpecker?” John asked. It seemed like a safe guess. He didn’t want to disturb Harold’s sighting but longed to touch him so he rested his hand on his blue-jeaned thigh very gently.

“Male Acorn Woodpecker, to be precise,” Harold answered, his voice hushed. “The Ponderosa pine is a favored habitat. Remarkable. He’s looking right at me.”

John leaned close to whisper, “Adding you to his sightings.”

“Oh, there he goes.”

John heard the flap of wings and considered it an all clear for leaning in even closer to kiss him, sliding his hand up Harold’s thigh. He began to ease him down on the picnic blanket. Between one kiss and the next John slipped from the moment, from reality, into an old script. It was Doc he was holding in his arms. He felt the rush of joy he’d felt as Johnny, the helpless lust, and he struggled to regain focus.

“It’s all right,” he heard inside and it was Harold’s voice, the intimate presence that could speak in silence. He latched onto it like a lifeline.

“I got lost,” he answered silently, drawing back to look at him.

Harold spoke aloud. “Not lost, John. It wasn’t just a script that surfaced.” Harold’s gaze at him softened. “It was a happy memory.”

That made John smile. Ford may have created the script but the feelings were his own. Johnny loved Doc. John now had what Johnny had always wanted, the man he loved. His to kiss and be kissed by, to touch, to explore a thousand pleasures with under a blue sky and warm sun.

 

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this story comes from a song taught to me by my mother. A simple love song filled with yearning. I have an unspectacular singing voice but my mother’s voice was lovely — gentle and low in register. She had a gift for harmonizing. We would sing this together, at a slow pace, her harmony making me sound good.
> 
> "Let the Rest of the World Go By" (1919)  
> ballad lyrics by J. Keirn Brennan, music by Ernest R. Ball  
> New York : M. Witmark & SonsHistoric Sheet Music Collection. https://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/sheetmusic/832
> 
>  
> 
> “With some one like you, a pal so good and true,  
> I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find  
> some place that's known to God alone,  
> just a spot to call our own.
> 
> We'll find perfect peace,  
> where joys never cease,  
> out there beneath a kindly sky.  
> We'll build a sweet little nest  
> somewhere in the west,  
> and let the rest of the world go by …”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Somewhere On A Picnic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20211940) by [merionees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merionees/pseuds/merionees)




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